You might remember that we’ve previously written about the need for a JICWEBS approved definition of responses generated by job boards so that ABC ELECTRONIC could audit job board responses to a common standard?

Well, we’ve been working with a group of job boards (including Monster.co.uk, TotalJobs.com, JobServe, Guardian Jobs, Hot Group and s1jobs) and ABC ELECTRONIC to come up with a proposed definition to submit to the next JICWEBS meeting and have recently got a broad range of support for the following definitions (which have the working title of ‘applications and referrals’)

ONLINE JOB APPLICATION
The submission to a server of an application form or a CV by a valid User.
Notes: The inferred intent of the User action measured is to provide contact details and information to enable the recipient to begin to evaluate the quality of the applicant.  However, the content submitted is NOT reviewed as part of the audit.  The site must provide auditable evidence of submission, such as a “thank you” Page Impression or a redirect to a success URL.

Note: Where these application forms are held offsite, auditable evidence will be required that the count of Applications is only incremented when a User from the audited site completes the form (as per the minimum specification).  Some offsite submissions can only be measured from a site’s own data sources by resorting to technical methods such as serving non-cacheable pixel tags or invisible IFRAMEs into other sites (typically the Recruiters).  Such measurement requires a level of interaction between job site and recruiter which may be unachievable. 

Referrals:
ONLINE JOB REFERRAL
A Click on a link within a job listing to a URL specified by a Recruiter.

EMAIL JOB REFERRAL
A Click on a mailto link within a job listing intended for the submission of applicant information and/or a CV to a recruiter.

Note: The site must provide auditable evidence that the link from which the Click originated must always come from the job listings content of the website.  For the avoidance of doubt this excludes corporate brochure pages, advertorials or display advertising inventory such as banners. 

The ‘Online Job Application’ metric should measure applications and CV submissions that take place directly within a job board, while the ‘Online Job Referrals’ and ‘Email Job Referrals’ will measure the number of times links to external application forms or mailto links are clicked on within job ads. While we know that an ‘Online Job Application’ actually results in an application (as we can measure a ‘thank you’ page) we don’t know the end result of clicking on a link to an external application form (eg on a careers site) or whether an email is actually sent after a new message brought up.

There was wide agreement from those involved in the process that these definitions represented a practical start to the process of providing advertisers with information about response levels generated by job boards (in addition to Unique Users, Page Views etc).

If approved by JICWEBS, ABC ELECTRONIC will then be able to audit these new metrics for job boards and it’s our intention to include ‘applications and referrals’ in addition to Unique Users as part of NORAS 2008. Any feedback very welcome!